Highlights

1972: Lou Reed - Transformer

In 1972, just two years after abandoning The Velvet Underground, frontman extraordinaire Lou Reed decided to embark on a solo odyssey just as the sleazy slither of the glam-rock movement had begun to win over the hearts, minds, and grinding hips of a generation when bands such as Mott The Hoople, David Bowie, and T-Rex became painted, androgynous deities.

After his adequate but unspectacular eponymous debut, Reed was savvy enough to sense the growing popularity of glam and its potential to be the vehicle for his musical rebirth. He also utilized the immense talents of David Bowie and Mick Ronson as the figurative midwives for the delivery of his first masterpiece, Transformer. While listeners will no doubt hear the more overt trappings of glam throughout the album, it becomes apparent that Reed's intentions are far more interesting than simply aping the horny frills and ass-shaking grooves of his contemporaries, instead simultaneously embracing and subverting the conventions of what some might have considered a fun, yet frivolous, sound.

Within the tightly wound genre of glam-rock lies a core of showy exuberance, and while Bowie and Ronson's tutelage may have led him to embrace their sound, Reed's natural personality and drowsy, dispassionate delivery gently mock listeners' expectations by defying our predetermined notions of sexy excitement with a familiar backdrop blended with elements of winking irony and anti-theatrics. Opening track "Vicious," for example, finds Lou monotonally drawling verses about suffering absurd cruelties: "You hit me with a flower/ You do it every hour/ Oh baby, you're so vicious," as the periodic punch of Mick Ronson's guitar lines throw up showers of golden sparks between lines, finally culminating in a wah-wah-fueled solo that dances and contorts like a serpentine livewire, playing up the disparity between the song's lyrical content and its title and music. Reed's brand of irony is not completely relegated to the humorous or offbeat, as evidenced by the morose piano ballad, "Perfect Day," which juxtaposes the seemingly pleasant and sedate activities of a couple in love with a melancholic dirge steeped in a black cup of ennui and defeat stirred by the swelling of bittersweet strings.

Despite all of that, Reed is just as adept at playing the genre straight for the eyeliner set. He churns out a couple of gems replete with fuzzy riffs and soulful background singers on "Andy's Chest" and "Wagon Wheel." Most impressive, however, is “Satellite of Love,” a dreamy cabaret-flavored piano ballad whose Hunky Dory-esque tone eventually dissolves into a sublime melange of subtle finger snaps, insistent horns, and spacey background vocals that sound like a handful of helium-filled Bolans being released into orbit.

Looking back on the diverse body of Lou Reed's work, it turns out that not only was the title Transformer the name of the record that put him back on the map, but may also have been a prescient wink from a man who always knew that his greatest strength would be that of fearless adaptability.

Seattleite Lars Finberg might be better known as the drummer of the A-Frames. Or, if you're from Seattle but don't pay attention to quality music, you might know him as "that guy who used to work at Cellophane Square." Hopefully you know him for the first reason and not the latter. The Intelligence always seemed like the area's best-kept secret, even as the A-Frames were garnering more attention, but that was fine -- it just made the rest of us who knew of them seem cooler by comparison. Now? No one's cool anymore; sorry.2005's In The Red-backed Icky Baby did a lot to get The Intelligence’s name out there. It also saw Finberg’s 'solo' project flesh out into a fully realized band as he was joined by Factums' drummer Matthew Ford and two members, Lee Reader and Nicholas Brawley, of the recently (at the time) broken-up Popular Shapes. While The Intelligence have been hanging around since 2000 with more changes in line-up than you might think, we get the stripped-down version on this release, which is Finberg, a guitar, drums, keyboards and a drum machine.

Over Boredom and Terror's brief 26 minutes there is enough variation to keep things fresh. But who really needs variation when you're doing something so perfectly? The drum machine and keyboard tandem of "Spellers and Counters" is an absolute gem. There's also the outright pop of the lively "Weekends in Jail," which features the most fleshed-out sound, and all without keyboards. "Telephone Wires" is the other more conventional sounding rocker, with more catchy guitar chords and a memorable chorus. Matter of fact, nearly every song on here has a great hook. They're great without being saccharine or trying too hard, and the weight of that success is mostly attributed to Finberg's delivery. For example, who knows what he’s saying on the driving "Guys"? It doesn't matter; it's how he's saying it that does. That might sound like a page from Pinback's playbook, but it's a safe bet that these lyrics aren't quite so oblique. They're just random.

In a perfect world, this would be popular music. Really, I can't think of many reasons why this band hasn't caught on. The music is ridiculously catchy, upbeat, clever, and you could probably dance to it if you were so inclined. Okay, there are a few f-bombs thrown in here and there, most philosophically on "The World Is A Drag," where Finberg asks the timeless question "Who gives a fuck if the world is a drag?" Certainly not I. The only track preventing Boredom and Terror from being a perfect album is “The Night Belongs to Microphones.” It's not a bad track -- not at all -- but it suffers from being surrounded by some amazing songs. This album was originally going to be released as a double CD, but someone at Omnibus convinced Lars to scale it back and stick to just one disc. The leftover material was issued as a bonus CD to be packaged along with the 12-inch version of Boredom and Terror that Narnack later put out. If only they would've switched out “Microphones” with "Darling, That Was A Lie" from that disc, then daaaaaaamn. That's all I'm sayin'.

ESG get treated by journalists like a group that the right people took under their wing, somewhat condescendingly implying that everybody was charmed by these girls with rudimentary technical skills. The spirit of punk had just as much room for three sisters from the Bronx as it did four pseudo-brothers from Queens, but whereas punk and the genres it spawned represented an ideology tied to a style of music, ESG never seemed particularly rebellious, and consequently came off as kinda naive, making them outsiders to an outsider art form. Maybe the downtown scene found a bit of primitivism in them, which might have helped them placate their own intellectual insecurities.

While those early hits owe their appeal to an irresistible spunk, attempting to achieve similar sassiness 25 years later just sounds sad. It's like watching your mom try to be sexy or something, and just as embarrassing. Tracks like "Purely Physical" and "The Road" sounds like strip music for the saggy set. The music sounds dry and cheap, like they're still playing the same drum machine they've had since the '80s.

Denser numbers like "Everything Goes" and the title track come close to finding a groove, but are hampered by the sense that these ladies can still barely play their instruments. There's something far less charming about middle-aged women playing clumsy beats and simple bass-lines than teenage sisters forming a band with instruments their mom gave them. "Ex" is clearly trying to be a sensitive heartbreak song, but I don't want to hear that kind of trembly teenage stuff when I know these girls have been having relationships for 30 years. Call me sexist or ageist for saying women in their forties can't pull off what people half their age do, but the whole point of getting older is to become more mature, or at the very least more proficient.

It must be frustrating for bands to realize the hot new sound of now is what they were doing way back when. There's a weird irony that young people playing old instruments usually sound better than old people playing new instruments, so you'd better trade your nostalgia for defiance if you want to impress the kids. Then again, if you don't care about keeping your cred and just want to get paid to play music, who cares about broke hipsters.

Streetcleaner, a work purveyed by Justin Boardrick of the current Hydra Head recording outfit, Jesu, is pure texture. Guitars surge like deep ocean swells; slow and damning. "Machine" spews out beats that toggle from tick to crash with no warning. The vocals are distilled to distorted, doom-mantras like, "You breed/ like rats," or "Don't hold me back/ This is my own hell." In the 1980s when speed and intricacy were the musical traits held in the highest esteem, Godflesh choose to reveal themselves in gradual, leveling eruptions of sound.

Inventors of the short-lived grindcore genre, Godflesh stripped death metal of its vocal barks, riffs, and gaudy drums while at the same time, besting its brutality. In so doing they polarized metal fans and gained new support in hardcore, industrial, and goth circles. The music; thick, bleak, and repetitive, somehow evokes lucid imagery like silent vampire films, scorched expanses of forest at twilight, and grey, windowless buildings seconds before implosion. This crafted atmosphere of utter devastation is masterful through the record's first side. It's only when we flip the wax that the results become a bit more sorted. Side two, recorded in a separate studio session, adds to the mix a second guitarist, Paul Neville, as well as slabs of sampling. In some cases, the broadened sound works; "Devastator/Mighty Trust Krusher" drips with urgent guitar shrills reminiscent of noise-metal heroes, the Swans, and "Life is Easy" barges out of the speakers with minimalist riffing. As we reach the title track and the closing, "Locust Furnace," however, Streetcleaner loses its sense of thick minimalism and descends back toward other death metal efforts. On these tracks, the riffing becomes prominent, and the growling-vox effects become contrived. None of this is to say that these tracks are weak, rather this more traditional approach brings the listener out of the horror and into the mosh pit. The apt noise-mongering grows that much easier to catalogue and falls into territory ventured by the likes of Meshuggah and Burzum.

Justin Boardrick would return to the magnificence explored on Streetcleaner's first side with the Godflesh follow-up, Pure and then embark toward more rhythmically-charged efforts with the Ice and God projects, before creating Jesu. Some may find it odd that the mastermind behind Godflesh could make the transition to a project such as Jesu which is lathered in melody. But, I have an inkling that to Boardrick, music is simply sheets of sound; obscuring both the good and bad, the sweet and deteriorated.

There is often a dreadfully fine line that exists between cheesy and hip when it comes to dated and highly stylized music. The Gentle Rain, throughout the duration of Moody, the band’s sole 1973 record, have one foot firmly planted on either side of that line. A labor of love of sorts for English producer/arranger Nick Ingman, Moody was the end result of two days in the studio with a cast of session musicians, including the always-impressive Canadian flugelhorn player Kenny Wheeler. Consisting of twelve covers of songs by artists as diverse as the Beatles, Laura Nyro, Stevie Wonder, Carole King, and others, the Gentle Rain’s arrangements are very much a product of their era.

Having had an initially limited pressing that went out of print decades ago, Moody has been long sought after by record collectors and crate diggers alike. The album is something of an anomaly that more or less epitomizes the term crossover jazz in terms of the structure of its compositions and orchestrations. But the inclusion of so many covers at the expense of original compositions has the effect of likening the Gentle Rain’s music to muzak as much as it does the jazz/rock hybrid form that spawned in the early ‘70s. And while much of its material is actually quite strong, many of the record’s more well-known pieces, such as the opening cover of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” have achieved the level of elevator music over time and through numerous paradigm shifts. Also serving as something of a distraction is the inclusion of now-kitschy instrumentation such as the moog synthesizer. Once the moog kicks in on several of these pieces, most notably on the cover of Johnny Worth’s “Gonna Make You an Offer You Can’t Refuse,” the tracks take a decidedly cheesy turn that causes the suppression of a snicker to be a considerably arduous task.

On the positive side, Moody is a beautifully produced and lushly arranged album that is perhaps one of the most eloquently expressive examples of crossover jazz ever recorded. Its obscurity makes it difficult to pin down just how influential it was at the time, but upon giving it a spin one recognizes the Gentle Rain’s album as the source from which a number of recognizable samples have been lifted. Possessing cinematic overtones that associate it with the numerous blaxploitation soundtracks of the era; it’s difficult to avoid thinking Ingman may have taken a cue or two from Isaac Hayes’ Shaft score (we’ve heard that wah-wah pedal before). However anachronistic Moody may be, it certainly does, however, feature moments of brilliance. Kenny Wheeler’s flugelhorn solos are melodic and seductive, and complement the somewhat funky nature of the arrangements, as do Ingman’s flute solos. An underlying vibe of eeriness, which is enhanced by the ensemble’s vibraphone playing and haunting Fender Rhodes electric piano, persists throughout the album as well. By and large, the Gentle Rain’s Moody is a curiosity that is pleasing to the ear and well worth seeking out as an artifact of the ‘70, particularly now that it’s in fact possible to do so.

We tend to take Brian Eno pretty seriously these days. After all, he did invent entire genres of music and merge the rock and avant garde worlds forever. From Robert Fripp to Roxy Music, David Byrne to David Bowie, Eno’s collaborations have yielded some of the most impressive albums of the past 50 years. Hell, he even made U2 sound kind of interesting.

But it wasn’t always that way. Back in 1974, upon the release of Eno’s second solo album, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), he was best known as a debauched rock star with a knack for salacious sound bites. It must have been that reputation that prompted Pete Erskine, of the publication Long Acre, to write that the album “smacked of the bogus.”

Almost 35 years later, it’s clear that Taking Tiger Mountain was no joke. Rather, history has revealed it to be a transition point between the more conventional rock of Roxy Music and Eno’s first solo release, Here Come the Warm Jets, and more experimental albums like 1975’s Another Green World and the ambient records of the late ’70s and beyond.

Although the album was inspired by a set of eight postcards depicting the Maoist opera Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), Eno never saw the theatrical production and was uninterested in doing so. His primary fascination was with the title, which he split into two parts. Taking Tiger Mountain seemed ancient and fantastical, while By Strategy was modern and technological.1 Throughout the album, this duality is striking, as Eno juxtaposes bizarre, noisy, futuristic sounds with impressionistic but often narrative lyrics full of Brechtian military scenes and references to the Far East.

Although we still get 10 songs with lyrics, verses, and even choruses of a sort, things aren’t quite the same as they were on Warms Jets. It would be a stretch to say the album contains a story arc, but the first song, “Burning Airlines Give You So Much More,” recounts a departure to China, and beyond that point, the music and lyrics become increasingly foreign and abstract. We’re left with the spare, haiku-like images, far-away chanting, and sweeping, epic-film instrumentals of “Taking Tiger Mountain.” The idea of opera, if not the Maoist piece itself, makes an appearance, as Eno delivers many of the lyrics in a stagey, declamatory style. Popular genres like the lullaby (“Put a Straw Under Baby”) and the soldier’s drinking song (“Back in Judy’s Jungle”) are taken up, twisted, and discarded within single tracks. At first listen, “Burning Airlines” sounds like a sweet, wistful pop ballad a la “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” but then you realize it’s about a guy whose girlfriend dies in a plane crash on the way to China.

No wonder Eno abandoned rock after Taking Tiger Mountain — he’d simply exhausted the form. And if he sounded a bit cheeky as he did so, I don’t think we can begrudge him that.

1 During the record’s production, Eno and artist Peter Schmidt, who created the cover art, took the idea of strategy literally, creating a deck of “Oblique Strategy” cards. Intended as guidance for artistic dilemmas and including such advice as, “Do nothing for as long as possible” and “Short circuit (example: a man eating peas with the idea that they will improve his virility shovels them straight into his lap),” the deck is now in its fifth edition. If you don’t want to spend all your pocket money on a set, try Eno Web’s [random oblique strategy generator->http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/oblique/oblique.html].

There's a lot of good music out there, and it's not all being released this year. With DeLorean, we aim to rediscover overlooked artists and genres, to listen to music historically and contextually, to underscore the fluidity of music. While we will cover reissues here, our focus will be on music that's not being pushed by a PR firm.